Tips Page

The creators of this wiki are new to this wiki business too. We borrowed some of the elements on this page from [Library Success: a Best Practices Wiki] which is a great Librarian's wiki that we learned from in setting up this wiki. Thanks Library Success!

If you're brand new to the world of wikis you may be unsure how to start. Here is a quick guide with some tips. None of these are required, but many of them are helpful in creating a sense of wiki community and making the wiki more usable.

why register - Registering lets people know who edited a page and allows all of your edits to be grouped under your name. This helps you establish a reputation -- this is important on big wikis like Wikipedia, perhaps not as much here -- and lends authority to your entries and edits. When you are registered, people can contact you through your talk page if they have questions about your entries or edits. Please note: Registering is currently required on this wiki.

annotate - You have the option of adding little notes to your edits in the Summary box beneath the editing page. When people look at pages like the Recent Changes page, or their own watchlist, they can tell at a glance what was done to the page you edited. Check the minor edit box if you are just fixing a typo or a punctuation error.

discuss - Every page on the wiki has a discussion page that you can use for discussing an article. This is often more useful than making an edit, having someone else undo it, and back and forth. These pages can be for asking questions about the topic, or informal coverage of a topic. Every editor also has a user talk page, which you can find by clicking on the history tab of any page that user has edited. You'll see a link to "talk" next to the signature of the editor. You can leave notes or comments just for that editor there.

list - If you are starting a list of tips, links, or comments, or are adding to a list, you can start your addition with an asterisk (*), which shows up on the wiki like this

Example.

It's just a good way to set each distinct contribution off from the rest. A colon will indent what you write as you can see on this line if you look at this page in editing mode.

look - The best way to learn how to format things on the wiki is to look at how people have formatted things on other pages. Just hit "edit" at the top of the page to see how people did what they did.

add a new page - You can easily add a new page by putting the title of the new page inside double brackets on the front page, (or add a subpage off of any other page in the same way). Then, when you click on that link, you will be taken to a new page that you can add to.

re-name a page - if you change your mind about the name of a page, click the <move> tab, to "move" the contents, including history and discussion page, to a new name. In order for the old name not to show under "Category" pages though, you'll need to delete, and re-add the category tags. (hint: just use <Ctrl C> to copy them before you delete, save the page, go back to the <edit> tab, and use <Ctrl V> to paste the tags back in, then save the page again.

link to the JMRL catalog - Make it easy for your fellow readers to check the availability of the book you love, or place a hold. You can copy, paste and adapt these strings to create catalog links:

add your article to a category - to do this you simply add the category tag at the end of the article. The markup looks like this [[Category:Name of Category]]

add other external links - to do this simply put the address of the page to be linked inside a single set of brackets. The text of the link can be anything you want. Just leave a space after the address and type the text of what you'd like the viewer to see. For example: [http://www.cvillepedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page Cvillepedia] which will look like this when you save it: Cvillepedia and the little arrow tells you it's an external link.

add an interwiki link - this is a link to another Mediawiki wiki page. To add a link to a page in Wikipedia, use the following format [[wp:name of wikipedia article]]

Wikis in Plain English - Enjoy this brief film explaining editing concepts!